


apsides

by penhaligon



Series: Watcher Kit [12]
Category: Pillars of Eternity
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-24
Updated: 2020-05-24
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:55:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24355432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/penhaligon/pseuds/penhaligon
Summary: A conversation in the aftermath.
Relationships: Eothas & The Watcher (Pillars of Eternity), Eothas/The Watcher (Pillars of Eternity)
Series: Watcher Kit [12]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1271783
Comments: 4
Kudos: 8





	apsides

**Author's Note:**

> A follow-up to [this](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23033755) (with references to [this](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23677633)), because all I do is write fic about people having conversations.

**apsides:** _n._ the farthest and nearest points in the orbit of one body around another

* * *

The first thing Kit was aware of was an ache in her neck and a pressure against her cheek. She jerked up and knew only that she was not in any place that she recognized immediately. Her hand latched on to the sword in her view as she grasped blindly for a weapon, but as soon as fingers touched hilt, she tasted the dew of early dawn. A tingling warmth like sunlight after rain leapt down her arm with the motion.

 _Easy, Watcher,_ a voice said, a luminous whisper at the back of her mind. _You are in your ship._

Kit took a deep breath and trusted it, even though clear thought was slow to catch up. The crick in her neck from sleeping against the workstation was not the only ache. It was the kind of sore and tired that followed days of hard foot travel, except it had been a long time since she'd walked that much. She remembered Ukaizo, and the struggle to reach its heart, and then things got hazy. She didn't know if they were still docked outside the city while the Huana arrived in greater numbers, or where Xoti and Ydwin had gone, and she didn't remember finishing the alterations to the sword.

But finished it lay, atop the workstation, once known as Whispers of Yenwood and now christened Whispers of Spring. Kit must have fallen asleep soon after, and if she thought hard about it, she vaguely remembered telling the others to get some rest, that she could handle what remained of the process.

Everything was fine -- well, mostly. She knew that. There was nothing left on Ukaizo that could harm anyone. But waking up in the still-unfamiliar bowels of her new galleon did little to ease Kit's harried, half-asleep thoughts.

Where were they? Why was she still here?

 _Xoti and Ydwin have come by to check on you,_ the voice said. _Edér was concerned that you would not go back to sleep if anyone woke you. Your crew is fine._

Kit removed her hand from the sword's hilt and nodded, blinking heavily. When was the last time she'd been this tired? The first time she'd woken up on _The Defiant_ , probably, with a soul freshly torn in two by a god that she was supposed to hunt down.

She captained _The Fulcrum_ now, with her soul restored and carrying a little too much of something else gained from too much time spent with gods, and Eothas...

"Are you okay?" Kit asked.

Even without direct contact with the sword, she could feel him: radiant essence burning within Whispers of Spring, housed so that it resonated in both her cipher's and Watcher's ears. But there was something off about it, even now. Some staccato pattern to the resonance that suggested damage not yet stitched despite her best efforts, though it was no longer in danger of dissipating entirely. That was why she was so tired, why she'd needed help from Xoti and Ydwin both: the transfer of what remained of a god, from Kit's broken pendant to her reforged sword, had not been easy.

The essence within the sword was silent for a long moment. _I could ask you the same,_ Eothas said.

"Uh," Kit said, "no. I'm asking questions. That's the deal, remember?" She ran a critical eye and a slow sweep of her senses over the sword, and found no damage to the blade or hilt or pommel. It was holding. It probably helped, that what was left of Abydon's Hammer had been melted down and used to reforge the blade. She'd never been able to figure out what Drawn In Spring had really been meant for, but the essence of a god rested in the adra she'd pulled from its remaining shards and grafted into the pommel, and the stone seemed no worse for its passenger. The adra gleamed now, a soft glow of life. "How are you feeling?"

Another silence dragged by in response, the presence droning both restless and weary in the endless oscillations that kept the frequency of the essence stable.

"'I don't know' counts as an answer," Kit said, more impatient than she intended.

 _I am... attempting to adjust to a new environment,_ Eothas said. _It is... strange._

Kit filed the tidbit of information away for later. There was a notebook in the drawer to her right, but pulling it out constituted one too many steps, when her arms were still heavy with exhaustion. "Yeah," she said. "This is no adra statue. This'll be temporary until..." She frowned. Until what? "Well, I _had_ an experimental construct going before you stepped on it."

Something meant for a spirit she still had to go and retrieve, sooner or later, and given the fact that the spirits trailing in her wake remained tethered to her in the ether, a power that for some reason had not departed with Berath's chime, perhaps that would be sooner. But would a metal construct meant for a lost soul work here?

Another long silence followed, and Kit didn't know if it was because she didn't want to breach it or because he didn't. She could feel it, though, when the shape of a question bubbled up within the essence, and she cut in front of it, because she had no idea whether she was happy or grateful or furious or surprised or irritated. Maybe all of it at once, but she was too tired to sift through it and find out, and she needed to get it out either way, lest it fester.

"Why?" Kit asked, because that, too, was what she couldn't figure out, and it was easier to demand answers than to dwell on how she felt about it. "Why did you do _this_ to yourself?" She gestured wildly to broken pendant, and to the sword, and to the broken piece of a god resting within it.

Exhaustion always followed in fear's footsteps, and Kit hadn't known that she could even be afraid for something like him, until she hadn't known if she could make the transfer work. She had to hand it to him: whatever disagreements she had with him over methods, he was at least as willing to tear himself to pieces as he was to tear into everything else.

 _You asked,_ Eothas said, with no hesitation. _And it was within my power to give._

Kit went very still, before she turned on the stool and restlessly took stock of the lab she'd had set up for herself and Ydwin in one of _The Fulcrum_ 's roomier compartments. Half of the room was occupied with boxes that still needed to be unpacked, and she couldn't remember what the lab had looked like last night before she'd set to work, but it was messier than it should have been.

Was the lack of memory merely exhaustion? Or a symptom of whatever she had absorbed from Eothas when her soul had been pieced back together, interacting strangely with her kith mind? Or was it the product of whatever _else_ she had absorbed when he'd thrown a piece of himself into her adra pendant?

Because she'd _asked_.

She hadn't been able to make sense of Berath's reasoning, of their insistence that Kit, of all people, could make any difference at all, when there was no stopping something like Eothas. But it seemed that Berath's assessment of the situation had been closer to accurate than Kit's had been.

"What happened to it being out of the question?" Kit asked, around the strange lump in her throat.

 _I had time to think,_ Eothas said. _I came to the conclusion that perhaps I owed you more than something I took from you._

Kit exhaled hard. "I don't want this because I'm owed anything," she snapped, and she gestured needlessly to the sword again. To the half-existence that what was left of Eothas now clung to, because Kit had _asked_. Her legs itched with the desire to pace, but she didn't have the energy for it. "I just..." She didn't even know what she wanted to say, and all that left her afterwards was another annoyed huff. Gods, she needed a nap.

The sense of the essence in the sword grew warmer, gentle rays of sunlight flaring with amusement. _Do you care for me, Watcher?_

He had apparently made it his life's purpose to irritate her, but Kit's voice held no coldness when she sighed out an, "Unfortunately."

The amusement radiated bright in her senses, before it trickled away, replaced by a rising tide of subdued curiosity. _Am I allowed to ask you a question?_

"You just did," Kit muttered, but she nodded.

The essence carried a vein of melancholy now, weighty contemplation that Kit felt pressing down upon her like a humid swell of ocean air. _Why?_ Eothas echoed. _In all my time to think, I came no closer to understanding why you would ask such a thing of me. Why it angered you so much that I refused._ The adra in the pommel glittered in all aspects of Kit's sight, the essence within restless and curious in her cipher's eyes, and weary and frayed in her Watcher's gaze. _Of all things to ask of a god you have never followed, and after all that I have done to you, why that?_

Kit let loose a long sigh and rubbed at her heavy eyes. Even if she tried to sleep now, she didn't think it would amount to much. Why indeed? Did she even know? She knew that looking past all that he had done was a deliberate choice, guilty in how freeing it was. She'd done plenty of wrong herself, not so long ago, and maybe that was all that it was, in the end. But that still didn't get to the crux of the matter.

She reached out and tugged a spool of wire across the surface of the workstation, absently bending the excess wire back into place. "You'll never understand if you look at it like it's... transactional."

 _It is not,_ Eothas said, oddly vehement. _It isn't merely that I felt a debt to you. I found that I... disliked the idea of disappointing you._

Kit blinked. Her hands stilled around the wire. "If I'd asked," she said slowly, "would you have left the Wheel alone?"

 _No,_ Eothas said, a soft thrum of gleaming certainty.

Kit snorted and smoothed the tip of the wire back down. "Good. I'd hate to lose _all_ respect for you."

The surface of the workstation beneath the sword was warm, a breath of levity against Kit's skin as she pushed the spool back into the clutter near the pommel. _Your idea of respect is unconventional._

A laugh burst out of Kit, a tired thing that shook her shoulders and had her slumping in the stool. She rested her elbows on the workbench and dropped her head into her hands, rubbing at her temples now. "That's because you've got to earn it," she said, and it slipped out on another half a giggle, nearly delirious in its fatigue. But however much her body ached and her eyes drooped, however much it felt like an age or two had passed since waking up the first time, it was a comfortable kind of exhaustion. "I, ah... I wanted you to have the chance to do that, I guess. And there's this thing mortals do. If they like someone's company enough, they want to keep them around. Maybe you've heard of the notion."

The sword rippled with essence, a quake that originated in the adra shard and traveled infinitesimally down the length of the blade. Kit didn't know if it was a sigh or a shudder, but Kit absorbed the perception of fatigue with it too, a mirror of her own. _I have._

"Yeah," Kit said, "well... that." It was hardly an answer, but her faculties were in no state to power through much more, and she didn't even know if she could explain it to herself, in the end. She let herself stop trying and waited, but the sword was silent once more.

It stretched on long enough that she realized that Eothas simply had no idea what to say.

"Don't let it go to your head," Kit added for good measure, but the corners of her mouth turned upwards anyway, tugged by an odd sort of victory. "And, look..." Carefully, she rested a hand upon the hilt and left it there, letting the sense of essence and oscillation sink deeper into her mind. The sword would do, and indefinitely, if necessary, but that wasn't the problem. "... I'll fix this. Probably not a good idea to go walking around in a kith body, but artificial ones aren't impossible." She frowned down at the shard of adra near her hand. "I don't care what you've done. I don't want you beholden to me."

And as much as she didn't care to admit it, the thought of leaving the gods to rot didn't sit entirely right with her. But they could survive the most massive of hits, and if she found something that worked for Eothas in the long-term, well... she'd consider offering the same to the others. Or to some of them, at any rate. Whether they took the offer would be another matter entirely, but at least she could say that she tried.

 _I didn't do this to place that burden on you,_ Eothas said, consternation flickering like an incandescent candle flame. _Or to concern you with the fate of the gods._

Kit got the sense of how wholly he meant it, and by extension, how it meant that he was content to dwell in the sword, and she really had no idea what to do with that. Maybe she wasn't the only one who was tired beyond measure. "Oh, it won't be a burden," she said, and then she smiled, all teasing edges. "We are going to run _so_ many experiments."

Another tiny ripple rattled the sword, a gleaming rush of energy and humor underneath Kit's hand. _I see,_ Eothas said. _You couldn't afford to lose a test subject._

"Now you're getting it," Kit said with a small laugh.

The future was a strange and uncertain thing, but it was a problem that she could tackle, a horizon full of answers waiting to be found. It left her with a head full of possibilities, so many that she hardly knew where to start, and it was another guilty sort of rush. She cared for the creature in her sword because he'd kicked that door wide open, no matter the cost, and now all she had to do was dig through the wreckage.

But he knew that already. He'd seen those parts of her bright and clear, in the sharing of soul space, and had only found things to admire, though she couldn't begin to figure that one out either.

"I don't want a god's help," Kit said, her smile fading into something contemplative. "But I'd like yours, if you're willing."

That pensive swell thought weighed heavy against her senses again, a swirling of preoccupied energy beneath her fingers. She got the sense that Eothas wasn't quite sure what to do with appeals made on a smaller and far more personal plane than faith. _You need only ask,_ he said, earnest, and the impression of fatigue beneath her fingers came again, rising and ebbing.

She'd have to look into whatever it was within him that still needed metaphysical stitching. Maybe she'd figure out what he actually _was_ , while she was at it, because she didn't know if he counted as a god anymore. It was a never-ending list of things to do in the aftermath, and lucky for her -- and for him -- that was how Kit thrived.

"Good," Kit said, and when she stood, the world tilted. But she grabbed the edge of the workstation with one hand and the sword with the other, and after a moment, her head cleared. "Because you have made a fucking mess, and we are going to clean it up." When she let go of the workstation, however, the dip of _The Fulcrum_ beneath her had nothing to do with the ocean's swell. The sword in her hands burned with a steadying sort of warmth as she grasped clumsily for its sheath. "... Later. After I sleep for a week."

 _I doubt that,_ Eothas said, as Kit left the lab and weaved through _The Fulcrum_ 's underbelly, heading for the deck. Like he knew that she would only be able to settle for a few more hours at most, if that, before the need to move and do something became unbearable. She'd have to see about getting _The Fulcrum_ underway and back to Neketaka first, because it didn't feel like they were sailing already, and then... oh, he was probably right.

She didn't tell him that, but he knew it anyway.


End file.
